Michael Kownacky

This week's opera comes from London's Royal Opera House and features the first opera in Wagner's "Ring Cycle," "Das Rheingold" featuring Christopher Purves as Alberich and Christopher Maltman as Wotan. The opera, performed in one 150 minute act, will be followed by more music featuring "northern" heroes (and an anti-hero) from Uumo Kalmi, Jean Sibelius, and Edvard Grieg,.

Dorothy Fields came from a fantastic showbusiness family, and her career as a musical lyricist and book-writer lasted nearly five decades. We're going to celebrate her talents on this program with songs from fourteen of her shows, many of which feature standards from the over 400 songs she co-wrote,.

The Sunday Opera heads off to France for the Lille Opera production of Mozart's "Don Giovanni" featuring Timothy Murray in the title role. After the opera, we'll sample three more treatments of the Don Juan legend.

While we were working on a previous program, we got the idea for a playlist of songs from the musicals about "dreams," and we've mined fifteen musicals from stage and screen to fill that list.

This week's Sunday Opera begins with Purcell's setting of Shakespeare's "A Midsummer Night's Dream" as "The Fairy Queen" and is followed by three (and a bit) treatments of Shakespeare's "The Tempest finishing with Paul Moravec's Pulitzer Prize winning Tempest Fantasy.

We've programmed fourteen songs about "music" from a wide variety of musicals for this week's program from Edward German's "Tom Jones" to last year's "New York, New York" by Kander and Ebb.

This week's opera comes from Vienna once again and features Strauss' metaphysical opera about the otherworldly Empress who must achieve a shadow (a child) or she will die and her husband will turn to stone.

We're turning to the musicals for songs about summer to either usher in or ward off the onslaught of summer weather. Join us for a playlist of 14 songs from stage and screen, many of which may be new to you.

This week we're heading to the Vienna State Opera's production of "Guillaume Tell" featuring Roberto Frontali in the title role. The opera will be followed by more music of Rossini.

Paul J. Smith wrote or orchestrated over 55 scores for animated films and 25 live action projects for The Walt Disney Studios. We're going to introduce you to the man whose music you probably already know through three of his scores for animated features and three from live-action films.